If Staring at the X distanced Forest Fire from the New York band’s beloved 2008 debut, the strummy Survival, then Screens lengthens the span so far that there’s no tidy way to bridge the gap. Singer Mark Thresher has said in interviews he feels entirely disconnected from the early Forest Fire material, and it shows. Screens boasts a new lineup, a new sound, and a new vision that exchanges homespun indie-folk for cascading synthesizers and prominent, jaunty bass lines. Gone is Thresher’s Walkmen-like caterwauling; on Screens he whispers his electro-fuzz vocals in a way that’s more Mark Linkous than the Mark Thresher of old.
While Screens retains the lofty ambitions of Staring at the X (“Annie” is an 11-minute krautrock experiment), the omnipresent analog synth, delay effects, and other sonic consistencies unite the record’s tone and mood more than the chaotic sophomore release. Screens feels focused, confident. And thankfully Forest Fire’s evolution hasn’t undercut Thresher’s ability to write a taut pop song. In fact, before Thresher appears in “Alone with the Wires” and “Yellow Roses”, Stuart Murdoch could show up and start crooning about Dylan in the movies and it wouldn’t seem out of place. The melodies are pretty, lilting, and uncomplicated.
This new iteration of Forest Fire is heavy on electronics, but it’s rarely robotic. The repeating bass line on “Annie” could be a loop, though I’d wager Galen Bremer is playing it live. A few minutes in, the buoyant riff becomes an addictive, hypnotic drone as Thresher casually cuts in with observations about the song’s namesake that range from the wry (“They know your name in the restaurants of New York”) to cryptic (“There’s something written on your forehead”). After 11 minutes you still don’t get a complete picture of Annie, but Thresher seems more concerned with wrapping her mystery in metaphor. If all you walk away with is a vague but real sense of this woman’s magnetism, that’s perfectly fine.
According to the band, the screens of Screens refer to the real (the screen currently in front of your face) and metaphorical (between artist and audience). Forest Fire subtly illustrates this by constructing musical barriers; Thresher’s vocals are often positioned deeper in the mix, obfuscating his volume and clarity with translucent fuzz and decay. When he sings, “They listen but not very closely, and mostly they don’t,” on “Passengers,” it comes off like an invitation (or a dare?) to turn up the volume and lean in close. Once you take him up on the invite, Thresher’s couplets have staying power—no matter how recessed or processed or mysterious they appear. On “Alone with the Wires,” he asks, “How long between haircuts, and who’s gonna pay for lunch?” There’s no reason anyone should have an answer for such a mundane, rhetorical query, but good luck keeping that snippet out of the brain folds.
If “Annie” is the most avante-garde, “Waiting in the Night” is the most intimate and Luna-like of the bunch; oscillating synthesizer and gently jangling guitars create a muzzy, pre-dawn mood. It’s the pinnacle of Thresher’s songwriting to date. Still, just like Staring at the X, a couple tracks on the second half of Screens go too far off-message and lose their way. The wordless “Fixation” feels more listless than experimental, and when multi-instrumentalist Natalie Stormann shares lead vocals on “The Great Wall”, it’s jarring enough to disrupt the album’s continuity (though her background vocals are crucial to the dreamy vibe elsewhere). But for the most part Forest Fire employs their new vision to dizzying effect. Hitting the reset button isn’t always a graceful process for a band, but on Screens the reinvention sounds natural, like this is the band Forest Fire was supposed to be all along.
